"Dolores Hayden infuses formalism with spiky wit and colloquial charm in poems that show us America from Maine to California, from Teddy Roosevelt's childhood to that of our own delightful, ever-so-modern daughter. She gives us a land of motorcycles, flea markets, old houses in new siding, and gardens that still speak the old Victorian "language of flowers"--but most of all she gives us the America within ourselves, a place of violence and drift but also--still!--sweetness and beauty."

"Hayden invents a totally original method of 'storytelling with the shapes of time.' The result is an almost poetic invocation of the resilience of the human condition, grounded in both theoretical understanding and practical experiences of place-making and preservation."

--Michael Dear

"The Power of Place is a graceful manifesto that enlists Dolores Hayden's formidable skills as a writer and architectural historian to argue for new ways to understand and represent the social history of urban space."

"Many of us are rich in private space but wretchedly poor in ideas about how to shelter two-income families and single-parent households in which at least one parent works a double day. This timely and imaginative book does a soul good."

--Arlie Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review

"This is a book about space: how we see it, use it, spend it, live in it...It's absolutely fascinating to read."

"This is a book that is full of things I have never seen before, and full of new things to say about things I thought I knew well. It is a book about houses and about culture and about how each affects the other, and it must stand as one of the major works on the history of modern housing."